Revis thinks Woody Johnson doesn't want to pay him

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When reports broke that the Jets wanted to trade Darrelle Revis last month, the cornerback's response was to tweet that he was speechless.

He explained that during an interview with the NFL Network on Monday, saying he was struck silent by the fact that the Jets had not communicated with the "best player" on their team about their desire to ship him elsewhere this offseason.

While the team hasn't told him anything that makes him confident he'll remain with the team, he's since spoken with both Rex Ryan and John Idzik and had no particular bones to pick with either man.

The same can't be said of owner Woody Johnson. Revis said Johnson will be the one deciding whether he stays or goes and that he suspects Johnson isn't interested in paying him the money it will take to keep Revis in green for years to come.

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"That might be a situation, that might be an option," Revis said.

Revis certainly picked the right heavy for his tale. Johnson has increasingly taken on the befuddled owner role perfected in recent years by Fred Wilpon, screaming from the hilltops that all is well while his team decays and rots around him.

The fact of the matter is that the Jets probably should trade Revis this offseason. Johnson's willingness to let Mike Tannenbaum wreak havoc on the salary cap in order to try to buy a winner in Ryan's first two seasons has left the team in a state that makes it difficult to pay elite prices for an elite player.

Tannenbaum also negotiated the Jets into a corner by including a clause in Revis' contract that he can't be given the franchise tag after the season, which means the Jets can't wait and see how his knee holds up before deciding whether to hang onto him. They need to sign him now for big money, trade him now or run the risk of watching Revis return to full strength in 2013 before signing elsewhere without any compensation coming back to the Jets.

Three pretty terrible choices, but a trade makes the most sense for a team that is rebuilding and still has a good corner in Antonio Cromartie. In the best case scenario, it is their Herschel Walker trade and the return vaults them back to relevance as something other than a punchline in a few years.

Unfortunately, these are the Jets and that means things aren't quite so simple. Other teams know that the Jets would ideally want to deal Revis before the draft and the X-factor of his health after a torn ACL is going to keep the price lower than it should be for a player of Revis' ability.

Such is the bed the Jets made for themselves and they are going to have to sleep in it one way or the other. There's no way around that and no way to make it seem like anything other than a bad turn that one of the best players in franchise history will almost certainly be wearing a different helmet in the near future.

At the very least, though, they could handle the departure with a bit more finesse than they handled the road that brought them here. Revis should be in the loop, the Jets should stop leaking information from every pore and perhaps this can be the start of the road back to respectability instead of another chapter of the big book of Jets dysfunction.